Gloria Pritchett (Sofía Vergara), (formerly Delgado), is Jay's wife and Manny's mother. She is from Barranquilla, a town in Colombia, which is a very beautiful place. She is a very loving wife and mother despite the age difference between her and her husband. Her voluptuous figure and overall beauty is often remarked or noticed by other characters on the show. One of her most distinctive traits is her very thick Colombian accent, which sometimes leads her to mispronounce English words, such as "ultimatum" as "old-tomato" and "earrings" as "hair-rings". (Sofía Vergara has mentioned that her character's mispronunciations tend to be ad-libbed.) She often supports Manny when Jay tries to tell him to be less sensitive or hide his cultural background. However, she does occasionally display some odd parenting techniques. For example, when Manny was first born, she had wanted a daughter, and therefore for the first year of his life dressed him like one and told all her friends he was a girl. She later told Manny (after he found the pictures of himself like this) that the child in question was his "twin sister who died." In the sixth episode of Season One, she chastises Jay for forcing Manny to remove his poncho for school. When they get to the school to return the poncho and realize that Manny has a plan to play folk music to his classmates with his pan flute (which was inside the poncho), Gloria tells Jay to break the flute, saying in her interview that "the poncho by itself is fine. The poncho, plus the flute, plus the stupid dance? My son will die a virgin." She is a horrible driver, though she is oblivious to this. She is also very comfortable with death (on one occasion killing and beheading a rat with a shovel right before she left for church and leaving the head "as a warning to the other rats"), on account of a couple of her relatives being butchers. She claims that, because she is from Colombia, the "murder capital of the world", she can instantly spot a fake crime scene, and tends to view murders as common occurrences, even claiming that the judge who presided over her marriage to her ex-husband Javier was assassinated during the ceremony. She is an excellent gun shooter, often just using one hand and never misses a shot, even saying to Manny that she could've unbuttoned his shirt if she wanted to with her gun. She has a very high tolerance for spicy food, and has perhaps the strongest religious views of any member of the family. She loves her family and spends a lot of time with Lily because of her fixation in having a daughter. Mitchell and Cameron asked her and Jay to become guardians of Lily if anything were to happen to them. Gloria has something of a shady past. She mentions that some of her closest relatives were butchers, and that during her fifteenth birthday, while dancing with her father, "there was not a dry eye in the cartel." Doubts have also been raised as to her income: her only mentioned employment was as a hairdresser (and later as a taxi driver), and Claire originally labeled her a "gold-digger" for marrying her wealthy father. It seems likely that Jay is her major source of income. In the final episode of Season 3, it was revealed that she is pregnant. In the episode Fifteen Percent she reveals that she comes from a neighborhood of prostitutes after she said her neighborhood had a saying that "Love is just around the corner".

Vergara had been widely known for co-hosting two television shows for Spanish-language television network Univisión in the late 1990s. Her first notable acting job in English was in the 2003 film Chasing Papi. Subsequently, she appeared in films, including two Tyler Perry films, Meet the Browns (2008) and Madea Goes to Jail (2009), receiving an ALMA Award nomination for the latter. Vergara's success on television has earned her roles in recent films, The Smurfs (2011), New Year's Eve (2011), Happy Feet Two (2011) The Three Stooges (2012), and Escape From Planet Earth (2013). In 2012 and 2013, she was the top-earning actress on US television.

Vergara stars on the ABC series Modern Family as Gloria Delgado-Pritchett, for which she was nominated for three Golden Globe Awards, four Primetime Emmy Awards, and seven Screen Actors Guild Awards.

credit: misst89

"I thought one of the advantages of marrying an older guy would be that I would get to relax. But with the swimming and running and rowing... it's how some of my relatives came to this country."
Hawaii (1x23)

"I'm a great chess player, but I'm a better wife."
Game Changer (1x19)

Future title ideas:"My mother used to criticise everything I did. Now I'm a jumbo of insecurities."